


Of Anger and Ardour

by thisiszircon



Series: The Moment of Awakening [4]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-19
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 10:28:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5244896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisiszircon/pseuds/thisiszircon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor and Ace argue.  Afterwards, Ace is forced into some introspection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Anger and Ardour

**Author's Note:**

> With grateful thanks to my invaluable beta-reader and editor, [Nemo the Everbeing](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemo_the_Everbeing).

He knew what he was doing.

Oh, he could _pretend_ that he didn't, that she was making a fuss over nothing.  That she was being childish.  But he knew.  Just as he knew how much it upset her.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" she shouted at the Doctor, so angry she was almost breathless.  Almost in tears.

"Does it look that way to you?" he replied, cool and composed.  Everything she was not.

"You know how much I hate it and you don't care!  It's funny to you!"

"How much you hate what?"

Ace hesitated.  What exactly was she so mad about?

Ah.  Yes.

"The spots!"

Yes, little blue spots appearing before her eyes.  Prickles of light that taunted her, surrounding her, attaching to her like a mark of shame.  Little spots, like the white feathers sent to a deserter, like a painted cross on the front door, like a man with a bell calling 'unclean'.  She'd see them, just out the corner of her eye, like the after-image of a bright lamp on her retina.

Little blue spots so specifically arranged, telling her things about herself, hurtful and pointed and deceitful and undermining and-

A sly glint appeared in the Doctor's eyes.  "What about them?"

He knew he was upsetting her and he didn't care.  She could barely stand how angry and betrayed that made her feel.

"Don't pretend it doesn't matter!" she said, trying to sound commanding but only managing pleading.

"What?"

"Leaving me those things!"  Again, the tangible nature of her complaint eluded her and she was left with a more abstract feeling of shame and accusation, somehow bound up in these tiny spots of light that danced around her frame.  "With the...the...and you knew how much I hated it and you just laughed!"

"So what if I did?" the Doctor demanded.  "I'm not allowed to tease?"  He shook his head and turned away from her.

His dismissal notched her outrage up further, and she was a heartbeat away from launching herself at him and smashing his aloof features into pulp.

"Not when you cross the line," Ace told him, voice shaking, trying to keep control.

The Doctor sniffed.  "My house, my rules."

Three rules.  Still thinking up the third rule.  His place, his rules, she was just a-

"And I'm just a lodger, is that it?  No!  Worse than that.  I'm a bloody squatter to you, aren't I?  A...an infestation.  Vermin!  I don't know why you can't...if that's all you think of me maybe I should just leave!"

"Fine."  He sneered.  "Leave, then.  I can always get another human.  Where are you going to find another Time Lord?"

The suffocating rage Ace felt was making it difficult to force the words out.  She wanted to scream, and she never screamed, and the fact that he was making her _want_ to scream just added to her fury.  She growled when she said, "Oh, you're so fucking full of yourself, aren't you?"

"All seven of me.  But you'll miss me when I'm gone."

"Better to miss you than to just-just lose myself in you!"

"Is it?"

"Yes!"  Ace marched across the console room - the way her surroundings leapt into focus made her feel something akin to surprise, because she hadn't even realised where this argument was taking place - and she made for the door control.  She paused beside the Doctor.  "I won't let you laugh at me any more.  No more spots.  I'm not your pet monkey!"

"Go on then," he said and jerked his head towards the doors.

Ace shoved the Doctor, hands to his chest, forcing him away from the console.  She just needed to reach the lever for the doors and then she'd be gone.  Onwards and upwards.  No more...no more things-that-she-hated.  Whatever it all meant.

The Doctor's hand caught her wrist as she pulled the lever.  The doors opened behind her.  She looked plaintively over her shoulder, then at the hand gripping her, then at the Doctor.

"Don't.  You.  Leave me."  His words were ground out through clenched teeth and the look in his eyes was as furious as she felt, but the mood shifted as he spoke.  She didn't fight him as he moved her hand and the lever together, and the doors closed to.

"I'm not your pet monkey," she said again, but she wasn't shouting any more and she noticed that the little blue spots were gone.  She was no longer sure who had made them appear in the first place.

"Of course not.  No hat," he agreed.  His hand didn't let her go so she kept her hold on the lever.

She found some vestigial trace of defiance.  "Organ-grinder," she accused.

"I have a hat."

"I hate the way I want you."

His eyes sparked and one eyebrow twitched.  "'You can leave your hat on.'"

"No hat," Ace said sadly.

"It's time."

He caught her about the waist like some winsome heroine on the cover of a Mills and Boon, and she wilted in his arms.  It was time: time for him to bend her back and find her mouth and steal her breath, and so he did.  The Doctor kissed very well, for a blue-spot-taunting rule-making overbearing alien.

And then the anger fell away and she was groaning with the shameful pleasure of surrender, as he lifted her to the console and perched her on the edge, still kissing, hands creeping into her clothes.  Ace ran her fingers through his hair.  When his mouth dipped to her neck she gasped.

"No more spots," she found it in herself to demand.

"No more," he agreed between kisses.

"I want this."  The touch of his fingers erased her clothes like they were drawn on in pencil.

"I know."

Ace wrapped her legs around the Doctor and pulled his head up, looked him in the eyes.  His skin was flushed, his pupils dilated, his shoulders heaving with harsh breaths.  He was irritated by the interruption.

"Do you know?" she asked.  "Really?"

He shrugged.  "I know everything.  Fall back."

Ace was hesitant, because falling back on to a console peppered with screens and switches didn't seem like the most comfortable idea in the world.  But she trusted the Doctor and, when the world collapsed around her into silk and there was only the pressure of his body over her own, she was glad she'd done so.  His hands caught her wrists and pressed them into the surface where they lay.  Sinking into softness, Ace arched up against him.  They were both naked now, and the physical intimacy was so needful that she could have wept.

He slid inside her and she moaned approval, a sound that was swallowed by his lips as he kissed her again.  Restrained by his hands and his body, Ace surrounded him with her need and moved in counterpoint, and-

~~~

Woke up.

And growled in frustration.  If she'd had just another minute...

Her panting punctuated the calm of the TARDIS night.  Ace concentrated on the sound and listened as it slowed down.  The dream flitted about her consciousness like the trails left by a sparkler on Bonfire Night, there but not quite there.  She knew she'd been angry; knew the anger had segued into passion.  But beyond that the details were already fading, already trying to slip away.

Breathing steadily now, she tossed her legs over the side of the bed and sat up.  This really was the last thing she needed.  Next time they landed somewhere there were humanoid males with even a hint of physical compatibility, she needed to attend to this frustration.  She'd obviously left it too long since last time.

Another bloody dream.

"'Twice looks like carelessness,'" she muttered.  It was her favourite Oscar Wilde quote and it seemed appropriate.  Then she added, "Lights please," and wearily went over to the desk so she could collect her notebook.  If this was going to happen semi-regularly, she wanted to understand why.  That meant recording the details for posterity.

Details.  Wherein, apparently, the devil resided.

The specific details of that first naughty dream had long since faded, beyond the explanations she'd contrived.  It had been about danger and forced proximity, Ace could remember, but its most significant factor had been the facelessness: the 'could have been anyone' part.

Alas, she couldn't really apply the same thinking to tonight's dream.

Ace decided to record as much as she could recall.  In the dream, she'd been threatening to leave; that particular notion was at least as disconcerting as the sex.  It was all because of some big row they'd had.  Ace couldn't remember what the row had been about.  She suspected it didn't matter.  It had just been a way of engineering some brinksmanship.

She sat on the edge of her bed and wrote what she could remember, in short sentences because she didn't want to find herself with half a bodice-ripper on her hands.  How he'd stopped her as she'd gone to open the door.  How the touch had made her body feel like cotton wool.  She'd been all rampaging hormones and 'Take me, Time Lord...'

Embarrassing.  So much for sexual equality.

Ace had always felt a mixture of pity and contempt for women who define themselves by their men.  Those feelings, of course, had originated with her mother.

Ace had shared a two-bed terraced house with her mother: the kind of place where the rooms were small and had thin walls and no one had any true privacy.  In the years after Ace's dad had walked out, that house had hosted a parade of blotchy male faces.  There'd been a new one every few months, all of them self-serving dick-led no-hopers who were at best cheerful idiots and at worst predatory animals.  It had been horrible and stupid, and worst of all it had been pitiful, the way her mother had needed those men.

Yes, she could still remember.  All too well.  And the younger Ace had sworn that she'd _never_ be like that; she'd rather be celibate her whole life than depend on a man for her sense of self.

In her adolescence, this knee-jerk reaction to her mother's behaviour had been intense.  It had culminated on that crush on Sandra Hampton: Ace had been thinking about that only a few months ago.  She'd been kind of drawn by the notion of being gay, or at least sufficiently bi that she could focus on the female options.  Ace had got part of the way there, but not quite.  (Of course, she'd gone off Sandra because Sandra had gone for Daniel Owen, and Daniel Owen had been a malicious, vain, self-absorbed little prick.  Even at fourteen, Ace had found it difficult to crush on an idiot, whatever their gender.)

Looking back on that time, now, Ace recognised that her anger had faded.  In her early teens she'd hated her mother for needing those men, for making them a part of Ace's life.  For subjecting her each night to those revolting noises of exuberant copulation, such that Ace had spent most of her high school years unable to invite a single mate back to her house for a sleepover.  Yes, back then she'd been filled with hatred and disgust and resentment, because the only thing she'd been able to think about was the effect this behaviour had on her.

But now?  Well, for a start she wasn't quite so self-centred any more.  Yes, her mother had made some terrible choices, and yes, those choices had been bad for both Audrey McShane and Dorothy too.  There were no parent-of-the-year awards heading for Rhyl Road in Perivale.  Even so, Ace had developed a sense of understanding - not forgiveness, exactly, but something closer to it than she'd had before - about those childhood traumas.

Her mother had been part of a society that applied very specific rules to women: what made them worthy, what made them matter.  And it was those rules that had influenced Audrey's choices.

Back when Ace's dad had left, all Ace had been able to do was point the finger at Audrey.  Ten years old she'd been, and terrified: that it might have been her fault, that she'd been somehow lacking as a daughter.  She'd needed someone to blame, and her mother had been the obvious target.  Ace had never taken the time to step back and consider how her father's desertion had made her mother feel.  How worthless.  How unwanted.  How...ugly.

It was after Fenric that she'd considered all this, pretty much for the first time.  This wasn't so surprising.  She'd met her mother again, but at a time when her mother was all potential, all innocence.  Naturally enough, Ace's perspective had shifted.

All else besides, Ace had learned, after Fenric, what it was like to feel you've been abandoned by the one person who is supposed to give a damn.

But she was getting sidetracked.

Ace went back to what she could remember of her dream.  She didn't dwell on the mechanics, which had been less than imaginative in any case.  Most important was that the Doctor had been in charge.  He'd initiated the encounter.  He'd bent her back, pressed her down, trapped her arms.

Did she really have secret longings for masculine domination?  And if she did, was there any way of explaining this that didn't involve her being way beyond pathetic?  God, she wished she knew.  Sometimes she really hated the fact that her only constant and trusted companion was an asexual alien.  Well, probably asexual.  The point was, she had no one to go to with these questions.  No one with the benefit of a bit of experience.

In any case, hating herself for her subconscious wasn't going to resolve anything.  So Ace shifted into analytical mode.

Given her childhood, it would be dishonest not to admit to the possibility of father-figure issues.  Then again, the numerous man-friends her mother had brought home during Ace's formative years had left her with no desire for an older man in her life; she was sure of that.  Before meeting the Doctor, older-man tended to equate to creepy-guy-who'd-try-to-touch-her-when-her-mother-wasn't-looking.  Not the stuff of romance.  So those two facts kind of cancelled each other out, didn't they?

Not a million miles away from the father-figure thing was the authority-figure, mentor thing.  The connection between student and teacher could be potent.  Even if her relationship with the Doctor was more of an equal partnership now than it had been before, she couldn't deny that much of the previous three years had been spent learning from him.  She was still probably prone to that mentor-thrill.

But there was something wrong about classifying her relationship with the Time Lord in such black-and-white, one-dimensional terms.  Yes, he'd taught her.  Yes, he'd guided her through some difficult episodes and helped her face her demons.  But she taught him, too.  He'd even said as much.  And she protected him.  _Real_ protection, not some delusion of hers he indulged because the teenaged girl with the homemade weaponry was oh-so-adorable.  Point being, there was more to their friendship than master and apprentice.

So why the whole 'wilting in his arms' business?  Ace believed that she was not, by nature, a submissive woman.  Was it possible to be a confident and independent woman in most aspects of your life, but still to embrace a submissive role in the bedroom?  That was another of those questions she didn't have the experience to answer.

Or was she thinking herself down an intellectual cul-de-sac?  Maybe the submission had signified something else; maybe the dream was less a symptom of hidden desires than it was a warning.  Perhaps her subconscious had been pointing out that to pursue the Doctor romantically would see her lose control over her own life.

Possible.  Very possible.  The idea even resonated with those elements of the dream's argument that she remembered.

Which made the next question an obvious one: _why_ was her subconscious trying to warn her off?  Was there a part of her that really did want him like that?  Or was it simply that she'd been unsettled by that first dream, so she'd spent too long dwelling on the possibilities?

She scribbled a few lines, following trains of thought.  Ten minutes of concentration and her pen grew still.  Ace read through what she'd written then put the book aside.  She flopped back and looked at the ceiling.

If there was going to be a third time, she hoped her subconscious would give her a few months' grace again.  These dreams were an exhausting bloody business.

~~~~~~

**Author's Note:**

> The song "You Can Leave Your Hat On" was written by Randy Newman.


End file.
